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Noam Chomsky

This week in the magazine, in “The Devil's Accountant,” Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Noam Chomsky, the prominent political dissident and M.I.T. linguistics professor, whose radical views have made him a cult hero on American college campuses—as well as a major cultural figure in Europe—and a topic of obsession online.

Two online sites provide comprehensive collections of Chomsky's essays, speeches, interviews, and books: the searchable Noam Chomsky Archive, hosted by the political monthly Z Magazine; and its unofficial supplement, Bad News, hosted by the liberal Webzine Monkeyfist. The materials here include an excerpt from a 1971 conversation between Chomsky and the French theorist Michel Foucault, “Human Nature: Justice Versus Power,” and “The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?,” a panel discussion from December 15, 1967, with Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and others, which centers on the problem of American intervention in Vietnam. It was Chomsky's role as an opponent of the war that brought him to prominence as a critic of America's role abroad.

Many of Chomsky's polemics are available for streaming listening, using Real Audio software. Among other things, visitors can listen to a hard-hitting, two-hour address that took place at the Technology and Culture Forum at M.I.T. just weeks after the September 11th attacks. Iconoclastic as always, Chomsky defines terrorism as including what he calls atrocities committed by the United States—in particular, its support of the Nicaraguan contras during the Reagan Administration. In the text of an interview from 1991 on foreign policy and the significance of Pearl Harbor, Chomsky departs from the traditional view by downplaying the attack.

The M.I.T. Press Web site provides the full text of “Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent,” a favorable biography by Robert Barsky, a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. Sections of the biography can be compared with historical events with the help of an interactive time line.

Chomsky can also be heard on the Internet Underground Music Archive, which hosts a streaming-audio file of an M.I.T. lecture called “Prospects for Democracy.” Chomsky, incidentally, is listed in three separate genres by the I.U.M.A.: Punk, Spoken Word, and College/Indie/Lo-Fi. Indeed, the man who Bono called the “Elvis of Academia” was once interviewed for Radio Free Los Angeles by Tom Morello, the Harvard-educated guitarist for the now defunct agitprop rock band Rage Against the Machine, whose album “Evil Empire,” which was critical of U.S. policy, hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The interview opens with Morello mentioning that Chomsky's books were easy to find on the Rage tour bus, and ends with Morello grilling Chomsky on his musical tastes: Chomsky likes Beethoven, but, as far as pop music, he says, “I sort of knew something when my kids were around, but that's a lot of years ago.” ♦